Determining the genre of The Drama is honestly a bit complicated that you quickly will realise after watching it, and even then, you might need a minute. If anything, the genre should have been “messy wedding”, though obviously not the type of messy we typically see at our desi weddings.

The movie was directed by Kristoffer Borgli and distributed by A24, with Ari Aster attached as producer, which should already tell you this is not your usual love story. Borgli has a signature way of taking something completely ordinary and making it slowly, quietly unbearable. He certainly chose a good cast.

The Drama features two prominent Hollywood faces, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. This pair together seems and sounds like the ultimate power couple. Their face cards are so strong that their names alone raised the hype of this movie long before anyone knew what it was actually about.

Robert Pattinson, the teenage crush of tons of girls, and Zendaya, the ultimate hype of this year, together these two tried something that is typically not their genre, and honestly, they totally killed it. There is a specific kind of tension the two of them carry in their quieter scenes, not dramatic, not loud, just two people who clearly love each other slowly realising they might not fully know each other. That is where both performances really land.

The movie is based on a wedding. It starts off with a cute meet-cute between Charlie and Emma meeting at a café, where Charlie approaches Emma pretending he has read the book she is holding. A meet-cute not so significantly different to make a movie out of. Then the movie jumps to wedding preparations and Charlie struggling to write his wedding speech. Through this, we are quietly pulled into the small, everyday moments of their relationship. And then, amid the preparations, the real movie begins.

A sudden conversation among friends leads to one question, posed after a few glasses of wine: “What is the worst thing you have done in your entire life?”

The question sounds simple. Asking it to your partner is one thing, but with other people sitting at the same table, eyes full of quiet judgement, is where everything starts to unravel. What follows is not a loud dramatic fight. It is far quieter than that, and somehow far more unsettling.

The entire movie then revolves around this one single question, and Charlie navigating it through every part of himself. It is almost like Charlie fighting with himself to convince himself that he loves Emma, and there is something painfully relatable about that.

Somewhere in the middle of the movie, I realised this is not a typical romantic movie, and honestly, typicality was never something to expect from iconic Pattinson and Zendaya.

Drama is the perfect word to capture the core feeling of this film.

With a 76% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb, The Drama is considered a solid hit. Zendaya’s performance as Emma has been widely praised, and watching her, you understand why. Zendaya as Emma is not something she delivers frequently.

The movie was not released on the big screen in Bangladesh, so we can only watch it on a TV or laptop screen. An uninterrupted one hour and forty-six minutes took me deep into a plot where I was defending Charlie at one point and questioning Emma at another, without quite knowing when I switched sides. Which side you land on is something you can only answer after watching the movie.

And honestly, after finishing the film, I realised that it was, after all, a deeply romantic movie that was not romantic at all at some points.